English Company's Islands.] TERRA AUSTRALIS. 
shore so plentifully with the seine, especially in Caledon Bay. They 
get the trepang by diving, in from 3 to 8 fathoms water ; and where 
it is abundant, a man will bring up eight or ten at a time. The mode 
of preserving it is this : the animal is split down one side, boiled, and 
pressed with a weight of stones ; then stretched open by slips of 
bamboo, dried in the sun, and afterwards in smoke, when it is fit 
to be put away in bags, but requires frequent exposure to the sun. 
A thousand trepang make a picol, of about 1 25 Dutch pounds ; and 
one hundred picols are a cargo for a prow. It is carried to Timor, 
and sold to the Chinese, who meet them there ; and when all the 
prows are assembled, the fleet returns to Macassar. By Timor, 
seemed to be meant Timor-laoet ; for when I inquired concerning 
the English, Dutch, and Portuguese there, Pobassoo knew nothing 
of them : he had heard of Coepang, a Dutch settlement, but said it 
was upon another island. 
There are twp kinds of trepang. The black, coMed baatoo , is 
sold to the Chinese for forty dollars the picol ; the white, or grey, 
called koro, is worth no more than twenty. The haatoo seems to be 
what we found upon the coral reefs near the Northumberland 
Islands ; and were a colony established in Broad Sound or Shoal- 
water Bay, it might perhaps derive considerable advantage from the 
trepang. In the Gulph of Carpentaria, we did not observe any other 
than the koro, or grey slug. 
Pobassoo had ma$e six or seven voyages from Macassar to this 
coast, within the preceding twenty years, and he was one of the 
first who came ; but had never seen any ship here before. This 
road was the first rendezvous for his division, to take in water pre- 
viously to going into the Gulph. One of their prows had been lost 
the year before, and much inquiry was made concerning the pieces 
of wreck we had seen ; and a canoe’s rudder being produced, it was 
recognised as having belonged to her. They sometimes had skir- 
mishes with the native inhabitants of the coast; Pobassoo himself 
had been formerly speared in the knee, and a man had been slightly 
